Also by Michael Beres
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The President’s Nemesis
Final Stroke
Chernobyl Murders
Traffyck
The Girl with 39 Graves
Michael Beres
Copyright © 2019 by Michael Beres
Print ISBN: 978-1-54395-797-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54395-798-3
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover photo by Danil Nevsky
Map by Colleen Beres
Thank you to Colleen for accompanying me on research travels as well as doing genealogical research. Thank you to Judi Robinson Laughter for sharing CCC information at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum and pointing out work done by the CCC in the Wyoming high desert and in the Utah mountains and valleys. Thank you to my Father for all the memories he left behind.
“I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work, more important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 1933
Contents
Chapter 1—1939
Chapter 2—2011
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue—2018 Genealogy Website Message
Chapter 1—1939
Flaming red hair in Green River was a mystery. Some said Rose Buckles got it from her father’s royal Hungarian ancestry. No one could prove it because he Gypsied out of town on the Union Pacific before Rose was born.
During the Depression, Rose learned to make feed sack dresses. Not colorful, but as she got older and winds from northeast Utah plunged through Flaming Gorge Canyon into southwest Wyoming, geologic dust getting into ranchers’ mouths and eyes inspired them to offer café meals that kept Rose’s hips and breasts in the pink.
Green River is in Wyoming’s southwest corner where, like rectangles of fabric, the state overlays Utah’s northeast corner. On windy days watching Rose Buckles walk down the street was like watching a monochrome film with red hair penned in by a Disney crew. Town whispers had Rose Buckles so flaming gorgeous, gossip followed like a lost dog. Maybe, rather than the rumored fiddle-playing Gypsy hopping a freight following WWI, a redheaded Irish teamster taking over from Chinese on Union Pacific or Lincoln Highway construction contributed the hair color genes.
Speaking of gossip, how about those FDR shovel soldiers whose begetters could be from anywhere? 1939 gossip had Rose accompanying local boys to the necking rock overlooking the river. So why not one of those Green River CCC camp boys, or a boy from another camp in the area? Maybe a homesick city boy from the camp 50 miles south across the state line in Manila, Utah—city boys dynamiting rock adding to all the red dust because Dagget County felt isolated from their county seat and wanted a road over the mountain to the “metropolis” of Vernal. City boys stranded in Manila driven north to Green River in government trucks a couple times a month to blow off steam, city boys gawking at local girls, buying beer, and whooping it up at the movie house.
Dammed, the canyon spanning the Wyoming-Utah line eventually became the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area named, not for Rose Buckles’ hair color, as a few elderly locals insisted, but because in 1869 explorer John Wesley Powell christened it the Flaming Gorge Canyon with its reddish walls containing the iron oxide mineral hematite. Before being dammed, the river in the gorge flowed fast like blood in a wild horse, afterwards no so fast.
That summer morning in 1939 Cletus Minch, a local boy fishing the river, was first to find a piece of Rose, a sliced-off hand with a pearl ring. Next day searchers deputized by the sheriff found her head, minus most of her red hair, on the riverbank, and another hand and leg downstream.
Because of limited remains, hair pulled out by the roots, and a mysterious father, legends surrounding Rose’s death spread beyond Sweetwater County, following the Union Pacific and Lincoln Highway east and west. Sure, she’d been a sight for men young and old as she sashayed down the street in homemade dresses, but she was also popular with kids and parents, volunteering for the overworked schoolmistress. Rose couldn’t afford schooling after high school, but wanted to teach. After death she lived on in ghost stories, a spirit teacher in late night tales at kitchen tables, around campfires, or while waiting to switch on the living room console radio to catch distant stations when sky waves get the ionospheric bounce. One story, in town but also rippling across the globe via WWII troops, had Rose’s bits and pieces riding high desert wild horses at night, searching for the rest of her.
Like any good ghost story, Rose bounces to far corners of the Earth the way the black and white newsreel in a darkened movie house—music and narrator loud as hell—jumps from celebrity to celebrity—Lou Gehrig, Albert Einstein, Marion Anderson, Edward Hopper, FDR, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Hitler—and from topic to topic—The 1939 New York World’s Fair, Anacin versus Aspirin, Civilian Conservation Corps successes, War in Europe, Gone With the Wind, and footage of last year’s Miss America beauty pageant.
On this particular night the newsreel’s interrupted by a guy in the audience yelling, “Come on! We ain’t got all night!” Funny thing, nobody else yells during the newsreel, and nobody tells the loudmouth to pipe down. Like he’s the only one in the movie house except the old man peering out the projection booth porthole. Beyond cigarette smoke in the projector’s flicker, the old man sees plenty of others down there, heads and shoulders leaning away from the loudmouth, distancing themselves from his yammering until the feature finally begins. Some arrived at the theater with bottles of beer. Now, with the loudmouth yelling, the old man’s glad he made the boys swig their bottles and leave them in the Green River Brewery box in the lobby.
A Ford Model T Runabout with Pickup Body rattled down the dark street, lifting dust from the pavement. The Runabout’s one working taillight blinked on and off—bad connection. Newspaper pages floated in the wake of smoke and dust. A Green River Star 1939 front page landed beneath a streetlight. Top headline: “FDR Serves Hot Dogs to King and Queen at Hyde Park.” Sidebar headline: “Cops Still Baffled in Local Girl’s Bloody Murder.” The Ford model matched what the sidebar victim’s girlfriends called her. Runabout.
“What’s his name, Rose? A powwow behind the dance hall’s nothing but a fishermen flipping his fly.”
“Not a fisherman. He’s from the Utah camp. Knows my name and soon I’ll know his.”
“Runabout’s the name those city boys’ll be calling you at their nightly gabfests. Runabout, Runabout, Runabout Rose.”
“You mean hard to get Rose. I’ve dated a few and there’ve already been boxing glove rhubarbs over me.”
“City boys will be city boys.”
“Boys when they join the three Cs, but hammering rock gives them muscles everywhere.”
“I remember Miss Watt in history saying Marco Polo discovered fishermen in Arabia drying fish and hammering them with rocks to feed cattle.”
“I bet that smelled good.”
“You better watch yourself, Runabout Rose.”
“The only place I watch myself is in the mirror.”
“You’re a real pip.”
The Ford Runabout’s leaky radiator, combined with red dust, mimicked blood spatter on the newspaper lying in the street. As the Runabout disappeared into the darkness, a big band intro to a vocal began, the music loud but raspy, a record’s grooves sliced by too many dull needles.
During the late 30s it became routine at the Green River movie house to have a cheerful or romantic phonograph record playing over the PA system after the feature. The PA system/phonograph setup aglow in the ticket booth closet was the work of a local young man named Tom who dabbled in radio and electronics, a young man who would eventually become a radioman on a B-17 bomber that would be shot down over Schweinfurt, Germany. Before that last flight Tom told his buddies about the girl named Rose with red hair, hip-hugging dresses, and a pearl ring supposedly left by her runaway father. Rose Buckles who’d been sliced, diced, and scalped back in Green River before the war. Speaking of death was common among bomber crews. Like Tom a couple others on the crew were jazz fans and Tom told how the old man running the movie house wouldn’t let him play his recording of Billie Holiday’s “Summertime.” On takeoff of that final flight, the guys in back began singing “Summertime” as the engines droned and the B-17 threatened to shake itself to pieces.
But that’s another story. For now it was a June evening in 1939 at the tail end of the Depression as a gang of Civilian Conservation Corps boys shoehorned their way through the exit doors on either side of the ticket booth. The light-bulbed marquee above the ticket booth read “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur.” The music from the loudspeakers mounted below the marquee was Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” on a 78-rpm record so scratchy you’d think it was being played on a radio in a lightning storm.
Thirty-nine CCC boys fanned across the sidewalk, a few throwing arms around one another’s shoulders as they crossed the empty street. Some resembled men, most looked like kids. Green River folks, asleep or listening to their console radios at this hour, preferred to think of them as decent young men, even if many were city boys from that camp south across the state line in Manila, Utah. Decent young men much like the mostly country boys who served at the Green River town camp. The Green River camp boys had become locals, supplying leftover kitchen scrap to feed livestock. CCC young men, no matter where they were stationed, built roads, bridges, fences, and cattle guards. They got 30 dollars a month with 25 sent home. Surely the city boys from Manila must be as wholesome as the ones from the local camp.
The baritone on the movie house loudspeakers continued his scratchy “Stardust.” The men from Manila swayed to the melody and looked to the night sky as they headed toward two open-back trucks, one a GMC, the other an older, heavier Dodge. Thin, trousers held high with belts hour-glassing their torsos, the men laughed and hooted, a few lit cigarettes that glowed like vacuum tube filaments. One man joined in singing “Stardust,” taking over from the baritone fading behind them.
To an observer in Green River that night, the young men might have seemed cheerful, yet their faces lit by yellowed streetlights revealed tension. Could have been the obvious—city boys far from home and war imminent. But there was something about the way they glanced to one another. One young man jabbed his partner’s ribs after they’d climbed into the back end of their truck. He whispered something about a pact levied in Barracks Three. If it hadn’t been for the pact, it might have been a perfect Hoagy Carmichael night of nostalgia. If it hadn’t been for pinching strands of the girl’s hair with sweaty fingers while agreeing to the pact, there might have been more discussion about there being exactly 39 of them on an evening in 1939.
“Stardust” ended at the movie house, but the record kept turning, putting out a 78-rpm cat scratch dirge that weighed down the men climbing aboard the trucks, smokers grinding butts in the dust like they’d been taught at camp. Only after the trucks were loaded—three in each cab, the rest in the open stake-sided flat beds—did the truck engines drown out the 78-rpm cat scratch. Jethro, a Georgia baritone, tried his best to continue “Stardust” using his Hoagy Carmichael imitation, encouraging pals in his truck to join in. But after crossing the Lincoln Highway bridge and turning onto the rutted Flaming Gorge Road, it was too loud and bumpy for singing. The 50-mile drive went from high desert to mountains as they headed south. Jethro sat on floorboards shouting in a mock Charlie McCarthy voice that he needed “ass burn.” Jethro was having a girlfriend heartache headache and what he really needed was aspirin.
The stake sides of the big Dodge truck rattled and swayed, dust from the lead GMC coming over the cab and into the bed where the men held on, those in the center lying or sitting on floorboards, those at the perimeter hanging onto the stakes and side rails and peering over the cab. Jethro could have tried “Stardust” again when the truck, still in high desert, stopped halfway to camp, but because of the Barracks Three pact no one felt like singing. When the driver cut the engine, wild horse hoof beats sounded in the distance, but it was too dark to see them. After the hoof beats faded, a non-singing tenor looked heavenward before leaping off the back of the truck.
“Hey, Mr. Deeds, are we back in your hometown yet? It’s like the song. I never seen so many stars. No moon, but I can see your faces.”
“Night vision,” said another young man with a deeper voice. “It’ll come in handy when we go to war.”
“FDR won’t take us to war. He’s like Mr. Deeds.”
“I’ll bet you a carton of Camels he takes us to war.”
The lead truck had vanished, but several men who’d been on it appeared on foot, teeth and eyes glistening in starlight against a landscape going from high desert to mountains. One man held a radium dial wristwatch near his shadowed face.
“Hurry up! We need help!”
It was dinosaur bone dry and cool after the heat of the day’s sun. Boots on the road raised a dust cloud above a ravine cut when rain was more abundant. Sandstone and quartzite powder got inside the men, ruining the aftertaste of beer, popcorn, and cigarettes, making it seem the workday was still inside noses and mouths. A section of jaggedness south against the horizon of stars resembled cathedral spires; another to the north resembled a castle lookout. Pebbles kicked up by boots tagged along like scuttlebutt threatening to reveal the pact. Whispers turned to grunts and giggles of nervous laughter. The discord of voices cracked the shells of manhood.
“Where is it?” shouted one young man.
“This way.”
“Did he heel and toe out of here?”
“He’s down there.”
The dark ravine at which they stopped was haloed in dust visible in starlight. Silence, followed by a moan.
Eventually the young men slid down into the ravine causing more dust. After a few raised voices, the grating of metal on metal, and a long drawn out scream, they climbed back out and ran. An engine started reluctantly in the distance, one gear ground into another, and the heavy Dodge labored into the night with 38 men onboard. Because of all the legs da
ngling off the back and sides of the open truck, it could have been a huge bug skittering across the parched earth. It took some time for the dust to settle.
The only sound in the ravine was the ticking of the GMC’s engine as it cooled. Below the front corner of the overturned GMC, starlight reflected in a pool of black blood. Nearby, a shadowbox sagebrush lizard skittered beneath the wreck.
Chapter 2—2011
Morning. Detroit’s Greektown. The revered Gianakos restaurant nestled among older structures. Towering next door the Casino Hotel’s upper floor balcony windows reflect a rising sun. Sounds of restaurant ghosts below the apartment as Niki awakens. Her husband pacing. The past. Niki and her husband visiting before the daily opening when her father ran the Gianakos.
Death for Niki’s father was swift, a fall from the roof above her head into the alley. Death for Niki’s husband was drawn out, cancer oozing from walnut-sized prostate, moving from nodes to bones to brain. After her husband’s death, Niki retrieved her maiden name to establish authority over the restaurant and apartments. After her father’s death she hired a manager to run the place, supervising various shifts, déjà vu sounds coming from below.
The neighborhood was also a ghost. This was most apparent during her morning run. Crazy woman in her 60s imagining she’s younger. These days neighborhood bustle consisted of gamblers looking for street parking for their visit to the Greektown Casino to give away their money.
She ran through the alley, saluted the spot where her father was found, and headed out onto the street toward the park. Although Greektown had become an island surrounded by abandonment, smells from childhood remained. It was garbage day, trash at the curbs. She thought of a Greek dance tune she’d recently heard. “Agapi Kai Alithia” which, appropriate to the morning, translated to “Love And Truth.”
She thought of the Ukrainian woman named Marta Voronko, with whom she’d shared messages. When she returned from her run she’d check her email. Messages with Marta were part of being a crazy woman, the two of them sharing suspicions about the deaths of fathers and grandfathers simply because Niki’s father and Marta’s grandfather had been in the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939. A long story detailing why a Ukrainian grandfather would have been in the CCC in the US. Two longs stories why Niki and Marta were suspicious of what everyone else considered accidental deaths of careless old men.
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